Fifteen years after the horrific bonfire collapse that killed 12 students at Texas A&M University, undergraduates there are again building—and setting ablaze—a monstrous conflagration on the eve of the final football game of the season. An immersion into the cult of the Aggies.

Mike and Dan Dubno are master tinkerers whose innovations have altered global finance and television news. But their greatest creation is Gadgetoff—a madcap festival where science and technology's biggest names gather to flaunt prototypes, blow stuff up, and peer straight into the future.

In spring 2012, Yasiel Puig fled Cuba via a human-trafficking underground that specializes in bringing elite baseball players out from under the Castro regime and into Major League riches—for a price. This is the story of how the cost of Puig's journey, in both money and human lives, shadows him still. The result of a five-month investigation that began in November 2013, and a finalist for a 2015 National Magazine Award in reporting.

The solitary act of swinging a golf club unites a hundred thoughts into one fluid second. So how, when the slightest glitch can destroy a career, has Tiger Woods managed to overhaul his swing three times? And, more important, why?

He was a coach and a mentor. A trusted advisor. A mover in the college hoops scene. But when financial scams caught up with David Salinas, he had nowhere to go but down. The basis for a March 2014 episode in the CNBC documentary series American Greed.

A horde of tiny Chinese companies have gone public in the U.S. since the middle of the last decade, raising billions of dollars from American investors clamoring to get in on the world's fastest-growing economy. An award-winning investigation into the possibility that most of those companies are frauds.

The art of negotiating with Somali pirates. An award-winning chronicle of one ship owner's ordeal, and a reckoning of the global cost of the high-seas hijackings that have plagued one of the world's busiest shipping lanes.

From his handmade airstrip hacked out of the veldt near Kruger National Park, C.C. Pocock, African bush pilot, runs what has to be the zaniest flight school on the planet. But if you want to learn how to set your Cessna down onto a dry stream bed packed with wildebeests—and survive to tell the tale over whiskeys with your mates—there's no better place to do it.

At the Old Town Ale House, one of Chicago's finest drinking establishments, the regulars are immortalized in an elaborate, ever-evolving gallery of portraits, all the work of Bruce Elliott—tavern keeper, painter, golf hustler, anarchist.

For almost sixty years, the weekly St. Louis Evening Whirl brazenly attacked criminals, exposed the sexual peccadilloes of the local black bourgeoisie, and racked up millions of dollars in libel claims—most of the time in iambic rhyming couplets. The life story of the country's least discriminating newspaperman.

Bike couriers have the most exciting career it's possible to be totally exploited in. The founders of Chicago's first messenger collective think there's got to be a better way, and so they've braved the gritty streets to build a business in one of the most competitive, bare-knuckle industries around.

Brooklyn, Illinois, has one of the densest clusters of strip clubs and rubdown parlors anywhere in the country, drawing patrons from nearby St. Louis and its suburbs. Inside the clubs with the dancers, a strip-club scholar, the mayor, and the regulars whose dollars keep the depressed local economy afloat.

On mixing your father his favorite drink. "Gin rummy matches until sunrise; unspeakable weekends in places like the Bahamas. Epic times have been related to me in which these men would mix Stingers by the pitcher."